Friday 6 June 2008 19.01 EDT
First published on Friday 6 June 2008 19.01 EDT

In the week of the world food summit in Rome, food is on the political agenda - and where there is faith, there is food. Certain faiths are associated with particular foods for religious or historic reasons. Sometimes the food may be a form of worship or spiritually symbolic; on other occasions it fulfils a social or cultural function.

Faiths, of course, also have festivals and holy days on which special foods are eaten. Tomorrow night sees the start of the Jewish festival of Shavuot, commemorating the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Many people stay up all night to learn the Torah and it is customary to eat dairy products. This is to commemorate the Jewish people's abstention from eating meat prior to receiving the Ten Commandments (since before receiving the Torah they did not know which animals were kosher or not).

Other Jewish festivals have their own particular foods associated with them. Food not only plays a central function in Jewish rituals and celebrations, but also has a wider role in the Jewish way of life. There are customs to eat certain foods, and also regulations about what can and cannot be eaten, and when.

Other faiths also have strict dietary codes, for example Islamic halal laws and the strict vegetarianism of Hindus. Religious dietary laws can be complicated, but even basic concepts are commonly misunderstood, as an outraged Alan Sugar recently discovered on the infamous "kosher chicken" episode of The Apprentice. This episode inadvertently highlighted one of the significant areas of common ground between Judaism and Islam, namely the similarities in the laws for kosher and halal meat.

There are also parallels between faiths in the practice of fasting on some holy days. Indeed the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur and the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan demand spiritual elevation through fasting. The practice teaches restraint in an age of gluttony. It also can inspire empathy with the hungry.

It is easy to conclude that these strict rules governing what people of faith can and cannot eat are a barrier to interfaith relations. However, some believe that food can facilitate good relations if we have better knowledge about the dietary practices of different faiths.

Besides dining together, there is also another way the faiths can come together on food issues. Most religions advocate helping the poor, and faith communities can work together on poverty reduction. For example, faith groups played a leading role in the Make Poverty History campaign led by Bob Geldof in 2005. Faith-based NGOs have also been key players in working to relieve hunger and mobilise aid, especially after earthquakes and other disasters such as the Asian tsunami of 2004.

The statistics on global hunger and poverty are heart-wrenching. More than a billion people in the developing world live on less than a dollar a day. Approximately 30,000 die every day because of hunger and malnourishment. Today the situation is increasingly drastic because of the global food crisis, with prices having increased by 71% since 2006, causing riots in some countries. Tony Blair recently announced that his new Faith Foundation will seek to mobilise religious communities in pursuit of the UN's millennium development goals, one of which is halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015.

It is clear that the relationship between faith and food has many dimensions. Faith communities collectively can play a part in helping to tackle poverty. Individually they regulate what can be eaten through strict guidelines. Through the powerful symbolism of food on festivals like Shavuot, faiths can also make us think more about our particular heritage and our universal obligations. The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach once said "Der Mensch ist was er isst", which roughly translates as "You are what you eat". Faiths remind us that food is not just fuel, but has religious, cultural and social meaning.

· Zaki Cooper is a consultant to the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, a trustee of the Council of Christians and Jews, and the director of Business for New Europe